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Chemicals, waste, land and the global environmental bodies

International environmental conventions · Part 2 / 2 · Fact-checked on · how we check

Written with AI from the sources listed at the bottom of this page, then fact-checked by a separate AI.

The Basel, Rotterdam, Stockholm and Minamata conventions on waste and chemicals; the ozone treaties in the family of conventions; the desertification convention and land degradation neutrality; UNEP, IUCN and the Global Environment Facility; all major conventions at a glance.

Part 1 covered the treaties that protect living things. This part turns to a different kind of danger: substances and wastes made by industry that cross borders through trade, rivers, air and the food chain, and land in dry regions that is slowly losing its fertility. Four treaties form the chemicals and waste family: the Basel Convention on hazardous waste, the Rotterdam Convention on trade in dangerous chemicals, the Stockholm Convention on persistent organic pollutants and the Minamata Convention on mercury. The part then turns to the bodies that keep the whole system running: UN Environment Programme, IUCN and the Global Environment Facility.

The Basel Convention was adopted at Basel, Switzerland, on 22 March 1989 and came into force on 5 May 1992. It grew out of scandals in the 1980s, when ships carried toxic waste from industrial countries and unloaded it cheaply in poorer countries, often in Africa. The treaty does not ban the waste trade outright. Instead it makes every shipment of hazardous waste across a border depend on prior informed consent: the exporting country must notify the importing country, and any country of transit, in writing, and the waste may move only after the importer has agreed in writing. A shipment that breaks these rules is illegal traffic, which the convention declares to be criminal, and the state of export must normally take the waste back.

The convention has since been tightened in two important ways. The Ban Amendment, adopted in 1995, forbids the countries listed in a new annex (members of the OECD, the European Union and Liechtenstein) from sending hazardous waste to any other country, whether for disposal or for recycling; it came into force only on 5 December 2019. In 2019 the parties also changed the annexes so that most mixed, dirty or contaminated plastic waste needs the importing country's consent before it is shipped; these plastic waste amendments took effect on 1 January 2021. Discarded electronics fall under the treaty when they contain hazardous parts, which links it to India's own e-waste rules. The United States signed the convention but has never ratified it. India is a party, and its Hazardous and Other Wastes (Management and Transboundary Movement) Rules, 2016 carry the Basel controls into domestic law.

The Rotterdam Convention, adopted on 10 September 1998 and in force since 24 February 2004, deals not with waste but with products: certain hazardous chemicals and pesticides sold from one country to another. Its full name says that it is about the prior informed consent procedure in international trade. A chemical goes onto its Annex III when countries in at least two regions have banned or severely restricted it for health or environmental reasons. For every listed chemical, each importing party states whether it will accept future imports, accept them only under conditions, or refuse them, and exporting parties must make sure their exporters respect these decisions. The idea is shared responsibility: a country that has banned a pesticide at home should not quietly sell it to a country that cannot judge its risks. Unlike the Basel and Stockholm conventions, it is run jointly by UNEP and the Food and Agriculture Organization.

The Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants was adopted on 22 May 2001 and came into force on 17 May 2004. A persistent organic pollutant is a carbon-based chemical that has four properties at once: it lasts for years without breaking down, it builds up in the fatty tissue of living things and becomes more concentrated at each step up the food chain, it travels long distances through air and water, and it is toxic. The convention places them in three annexes. Annex A chemicals are to be eliminated; Annex B chemicals are restricted to listed purposes; Annex C covers chemicals formed and released unintentionally, such as dioxins and furans from burning, whose release must be cut. It began with twelve chemicals, often called the 'dirty dozen', among them DDT, PCBs, dioxins and furans, and a review committee has since added many more, including the pesticide endosulfan in 2011. DDT sits in Annex B because it may still be used to control malaria-carrying mosquitoes where no safe and affordable alternative exists.

The Minamata Convention takes its name from the Japanese town of Minamata, where in the 1950s a chemical factory released mercury compounds in its waste water into the bay; the poison built up in fish and shellfish, and many people who ate them suffered severe damage to the nervous system, a condition that came to be called Minamata disease. Adopted in October 2013 and in force since 16 August 2017, the convention follows mercury through its whole life. It bans new primary mercury mines and requires existing ones to close within fifteen years; it phases out mercury in many products, such as thermometers, certain batteries and cosmetics, with a 2020 deadline; it requires a gradual reduction in the use of mercury in dental fillings; and it controls emissions from sources such as coal-fired power plants, cement kilns and metal smelters. India ratified the convention in 2018.

These chemical treaties overlap, because one substance can be a product in trade, a pollutant in the air and a waste at the end of its life. The Basel, Rotterdam and Stockholm conventions now share a single secretariat based in Geneva, with the Rotterdam part also hosted by FAO in Rome, and their Conferences of the Parties meet back to back so that decisions fit together. The ozone treaties, taught in the climate change chapter, belong to the same family: the Vienna Convention of 1985 is the framework, the Montreal Protocol of 1987 phases out ozone-depleting substances, and the Kigali Amendment of 2016 adds hydrofluorocarbons. The Montreal Protocol is often called the most successful environmental treaty, since every UN member state has ratified it and the ozone layer is on course to recover. It also has its own money, the Multilateral Fund, set up in 1990, instead of relying on the shared fund described later in this part.

The four chemical and waste conventions
ConventionAdopted / in forceDeals withMain tool
Basel1989 / 1992Hazardous waste moving across bordersPrior informed consent for each shipment; Ban Amendment (in force 2019)
Rotterdam1998 / 2004Trade in listed hazardous chemicals and pesticidesImport decisions for Annex III chemicals; labelling
Stockholm2001 / 2004Persistent organic pollutantsEliminate (Annex A), restrict (B), cut unintended release (C)
Minamata2013 / 2017MercuryNo new mines; product phase-out; emission controls

The UN Convention to Combat Desertification was adopted in Paris on 17 June 1994 and came into force on 26 December 1996; 17 June is observed each year as Desertification and Drought Day. In the treaty, desertification does not mean sand dunes marching forward on their own. It means land in dry areas, arid, semi-arid and dry sub-humid, losing its ability to grow crops and hold water, through causes such as overgrazing, clearing of forests, poor irrigation and changes in climate. Its secretariat is in Bonn. Its central aim today is land degradation neutrality: every area of land that is degraded should be balanced by an area restored, so that the total stock of healthy land does not shrink; the same idea appears as target 15.3 of the Sustainable Development Goals. When the parties met for their fourteenth session at Greater Noida in September 2019, with India as host, India raised its own restoration pledge to cover 26 million hectares of worn-out land by the end of the decade, 2030.

UN Environment Programme was created by the UN General Assembly in December 1972, as an outcome of the Stockholm Conference, and has its headquarters in Nairobi, Kenya. It is not a treaty but the UN's lead body on the environment: it reviews the state of the global environment and provides the secretariats of several conventions, among them the CBD, CITES, CMS, the Basel and Stockholm conventions, the Minamata Convention and the ozone treaties. Its governing body is the UN Environment Assembly, in which all UN member states sit; it was created in 2012 and first met in 2014. Its regular reports include the Global Environment Outlook and the Emissions Gap Report, and together with the World Meteorological Organization it set up the IPCC in 1988. It leads World Environment Day on 5 June, which India hosted in 2018 with the theme 'Beat Plastic Pollution'. Talks on a binding treaty to end plastic pollution, launched by the Environment Assembly in 2022, ended without an agreed text at Busan (2024) and Geneva (2025).

The International Union for Conservation of Nature, IUCN, is an unusual body. Founded in 1948 and based at Gland in Switzerland, it is a union whose members include states, government agencies and non-governmental organisations. It is not a UN agency, though it has observer status at the UN General Assembly. Its best-known product is the IUCN Red List, which assesses how close species are to extinction, in categories running from Least Concern to Extinct. Through expert commissions such as the World Commission on Protected Areas it sets the global categories of protected areas, and it advises UNESCO's World Heritage Committee on natural sites. Two names are often confused with it. WWF, founded in 1961 and also based at Gland, is a conservation NGO, not a union that includes governments. TRAFFIC, set up in 1976 by WWF and IUCN, monitors the trade in wild animals and plants and supports the work of CITES.

The Global Environment Facility is the purse that several treaties share. Set up in 1991 as a pilot programme within the World Bank and restructured in 1994 after the Rio summit, it is a partnership of governments with a secretariat in Washington and the World Bank as its trustee. It serves as a financial mechanism of the CBD, the UN climate convention, the Stockholm Convention, the desertification convention and the Minamata Convention. Donor countries refill it every four years in what is called a replenishment; GEF-8, for example, ran from July 2022 to June 2026. It should not be confused with the Multilateral Fund of the Montreal Protocol or with the Green Climate Fund, which serves only the climate treaties.

Each treaty of this chapter targets a single kind of harm: life and genes (CBD), the wildlife trade (CITES), migrating animals (CMS), wetlands (Ramsar), waste crossing borders (Basel), dangerous chemicals in trade (Rotterdam), long-lasting poisons (Stockholm), mercury (Minamata), the ozone layer (Vienna and Montreal) and dry land (UNCCD). Behind the treaties, UN Environment Programme supplies science and many secretariats, IUCN supplies expertise and the Red List, and the Global Environment Facility supplies much of the money. India is a party to all of these treaties and gives them effect at home through the Environment (Protection) Act and the rules made under it, the Wild Life (Protection) Act and the Biological Diversity Act.

The major environmental conventions at a glance
ConventionAdopted (in force)Protects or controlsSecretariat
Ramsar1971 (1975)WetlandsGland
CITES1973 (1975)International trade in wild speciesGeneva
CMS1979 (1983)Migratory animalsBonn
Vienna / Montreal1985 (1988) / 1987 (1989)Ozone layerNairobi
Basel1989 (1992)Hazardous waste across bordersGeneva
CBD1992 (1993)Biodiversity and genetic resourcesMontreal
UNFCCC1992 (1994)ClimateBonn
UNCCD1994 (1996)Land in dry areasBonn
Rotterdam1998 (2004)Trade in hazardous chemicalsGeneva and Rome
Stockholm2001 (2004)Persistent organic pollutantsGeneva
Minamata2013 (2017)MercuryGeneva

Exam traps

Recap

Practice questions

Q1. Which one of the following international agreements regulates the movement of hazardous wastes from one country to another?

  1. Rotterdam Convention
  2. Basel Convention
  3. Stockholm Convention
  4. Minamata Convention
Show answer

Answer: B. Basel Convention

The Basel Convention (1989) controls transboundary movements of hazardous wastes. Rotterdam covers trade in hazardous chemicals and pesticides as products, Stockholm covers persistent organic pollutants, and Minamata covers mercury.

Q2. Consider the following statements about the Rotterdam Convention:
1. It applies a prior informed consent procedure to the chemicals and pesticides listed in its Annex III.
2. Its secretariat is provided by UNEP alone.
Which of the statements given above is/are correct?

  1. 1 only
  2. 2 only
  3. Both 1 and 2
  4. Neither 1 nor 2
Show answer

Answer: A. 1 only

Statement 1 is correct. Statement 2 is wrong: the Rotterdam secretariat is run jointly by UNEP and FAO. So option 2 picks the false statement, option 3 includes it, and option 4 rejects the true statement 1.

Q3. Which of the following are characteristics of persistent organic pollutants as described in the Stockholm Convention?
1. They resist breaking down in the environment.
2. They accumulate in the fatty tissue of living organisms.
3. They can travel long distances from where they are released.
Select the correct answer using the code given below.

  1. 1 and 2 only
  2. 2 and 3 only
  3. 1 and 3 only
  4. 1, 2 and 3
Show answer

Answer: D. 1, 2 and 3

All three are defining features, along with toxicity: persistence, bioaccumulation and long-range transport. Each of the other options leaves out one true property.

Q4. Match List I (Convention) with List II (Subject):
List I: A. Basel B. Stockholm C. Minamata D. UNCCD
List II: 1. Mercury 2. Hazardous waste across borders 3. Land degradation in dry areas 4. Persistent organic pollutants
Select the correct answer using the code given below.

  1. A-2, B-4, C-1, D-3
  2. A-4, B-2, C-1, D-3
  3. A-2, B-4, C-3, D-1
  4. A-1, B-4, C-2, D-3
Show answer

Answer: A. A-2, B-4, C-1, D-3

Basel deals with hazardous waste across borders, Stockholm with persistent organic pollutants, Minamata with mercury and the UNCCD with land degradation in dry areas. Option 2 swaps Basel and Stockholm, option 3 swaps Minamata and the UNCCD, and option 4 swaps Basel and Minamata.

Q5. Consider the following statements:
1. Land degradation neutrality appears as target 15.3 of the Sustainable Development Goals.
2. The fourteenth session of the parties to the desertification convention met on Indian soil in 2019.
Which of the statements given above is/are correct?

  1. 1 only
  2. 2 only
  3. Both 1 and 2
  4. Neither 1 nor 2
Show answer

Answer: C. Both 1 and 2

Both are correct: SDG target 15.3 aims at a land degradation-neutral world, and COP14 was held at Greater Noida in September 2019. Options 1 and 2 each drop a true statement, and option 4 rejects both.

Q6. With reference to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), consider the following statements:
1. Its headquarters is at Gland in Switzerland.
2. Its membership is mixed: some members are governments, others are non-state organisations.
3. It is a specialised agency of the United Nations.
Which of the statements given above is/are correct?

  1. 1 and 2 only
  2. 2 and 3 only
  3. 1 and 3 only
  4. 1, 2 and 3
Show answer

Answer: A. 1 and 2 only

Statements 1 and 2 are correct. Statement 3 is wrong: IUCN is not a UN agency, though it has observer status at the UN General Assembly. Options 2, 3 and 4 all include the false statement 3.

Q7. The Global Environment Facility serves as a financial mechanism for which of the following?
1. Convention on Biological Diversity
2. UN Framework Convention on Climate Change
3. Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants
4. Montreal Protocol
Select the correct answer using the code given below.

  1. 1 and 2 only
  2. 1, 2 and 3 only
  3. 2, 3 and 4 only
  4. 1, 2, 3 and 4
Show answer

Answer: B. 1, 2 and 3 only

The GEF is a financial mechanism of the CBD, the UNFCCC and the Stockholm Convention (and of the UNCCD and Minamata). The Montreal Protocol has its own Multilateral Fund, so options 3 and 4 are wrong; option 1 leaves out the Stockholm Convention.

Q8. Consider the following statements about the UN Environment Programme (UNEP):
1. Its headquarters is in Nairobi.
2. It was established as an outcome of the Rio Earth Summit of 1992.
Which of the statements given above is/are correct?

  1. 1 only
  2. 2 only
  3. Both 1 and 2
  4. Neither 1 nor 2
Show answer

Answer: A. 1 only

Statement 1 is correct. Statement 2 is wrong: UNEP was created by the UN General Assembly in December 1972 after the Stockholm Conference, twenty years before Rio. Option 2 picks the false statement, option 3 includes it, and option 4 rejects the true one.

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